Month: October 2011

It’s Halloween time! Which means everyone is dressing up as someone/something. If you’re like me, you don’t go to Ricky’s and buy a pre-made outfit of a French Maid or a Witch (leave it to peeps with no imagination). You make your own!

For a third year, I’m making my own unique costume out of easily-obtainable items. Let’s get to it: how to make a MacBook Pro outfit!

You will need:

– Silver or gray outfit. I did a short-sleeved sweater and a skirt. You can do a top and a bottom or a dress. Sweater-like material works best because you can poke the el wire right through it and it’s thick enough to not be too transparent. Also don’t forget about tights, shoes, etc. so you have a full getup.

– El wire to make a logo. You can buy it online. Here’s the one that i got: 3-foot white el wire. It is connected to an AAA battery and has a switch – super cool!

– Silver/gray thread and a needle

– Printer (optional). It helps to print out the actual Apple logo and then trace it with the wire.

– Black masking tape. I got one at the Paper Presentation store in NYC, but I’m sure craft or art stores have them too. Mine is about 1.5-2 inch wide which is perfect. We will make keys with it.

– Silver pen. I got mine at Paper Presentation as well. That store is absolutely awesome – they have everything and some more.

– Mad skillz! Which I’m going to teach you right now. Ready?

How to put it together

Step 1: Print logo (can be skipped if you have an awesome visual memory and can do it without the printout)

Print out the Apple logo of a decent size that will go on the back of your outfit. Here’s a quick tip on how to make it: on your Mac, open up any text editor, and press Option-Shift-K. It will make a nifty little icon like this: ?

You can blow it up to any size (I did 500 or 550) and printed it on a regular letter size paper.

Then cut out the template. You don’t need to separate the apple and the leaf, keep them together.

Step 2: Sew the el-wire in the shape of the Apple logo to your outfit

Lay your outfit (top) on a flat surface. I did mine on the floor.

Take some pins and stick your printout to the outfit, make sure it’s on the back and symmetrically placed. Apple is known for great design after all!

Put the el wire inside your sweater, and poke a hole right through the part where leaf meets the apple. That would be our starting point.

Pull out most of the wire and start shaping the leaf. Be careful not to bend it too much. Start sewing the wire into the outfit.

Continue shaping the wire along the logo outline and sewing it onto your sweater.

Once done, pull the remaining el wire from the inside, and attach loose ends with pins or sew them in so you can comfortably wear it.

The end result should look like this:

Way cool!!! Notice that the thicker sweater works best because it’s not too transparent.

Step 3: Make keys

Take your masking tape and start cutting keys in the square shapes with slightly rounded corners. If you look at your Mac you should be able to easily copy the shape. Write letters in QWERTY order (or any order for that matter! you can spell your favorite band’s name if you want!)

As you go, arrange letters nicely and symmetrically. I only did 3 rows of letters, without any function keys. It’s up to you how many you want to do (guess depends on how patient you are).

Just got a call from my account team asking me if there’s a way to create a report in Analytics that combines multiple views into one.

Initially, I thought of auto-emailing multiple reports, but it’s a hassle: we track 7 different Flash events for 7 brands, so imagine creating 1 summary report plus 7 brand reports and emailing those 8 files to someone on the team who would most likely need to re-jiggle the data into one big summary.

Turns out Google Analytics allows for a super efficient cool way to do this: put all reports into the Dashboard!

How to do this: when you are viewing the report that you’d like to see regularly, click on the Dashboard icon at the top (next to Export and Email icons). This will move this report to the Dashboard. Once you’re done, go back to the main screen (that is the Dashboard) and re-arrange your reports however you like.

Another helpful hint: you can then schedule your Dashboard report to be emailed to you as a PDF file (daily or every Monday).